Struggles of love

A  couple of recent movies confirmed what to my mind is the oldest adage: “If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it's yours. If not, it was never meant to be.”

Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War is about an unlikely romantic relationship between a music director (Tomasz Kot) and a singer (Joanna Kulig) who he discovers during the 1950s. The film fetched Pawlikowski the best director award at the Cannes Festival this year — another testament to the movie's delicate beauty that exudes from each and every one of its black-and-white frame.

With Cold War, Pawlikowski is yet again in the running for the Oscar for best foreign language film, after winning it in 2015 for Ida. Unlike his previous movie, here the Polish auteur has made his heroine a metaphor for volcanic emotional eruptions, whether it is through her vocal chops or rage or love or drunkenness. While Kot ambles his way through, the movie is driven from start to finish by Kulig’s Mount Etna-level eruptions. Their blooming romance gets nipped in the bud when they get separated owing to the fear of the Iron Curtain, only to meet again in Paris after a few years.

Pawlikowski’s 90-minute movie covers nearly a decade without wasting a frame. At the recently concluded 41st Denver Film Festival, this movie got a standing ovation — fittingly so. Do keep your eyes peeled for December 21, the date the movie releases on Amazon Prime.
 

A still from 96

The movie’s best parts are the initial scenes where the troupe is making rounds of rural Poland to showcase the culture and the forgotten music of yore. Some of those sounds are the most mellifluous warbles you'll hear this year, apart from the brutally addictive multiple renditions of “dwa serduszka, cztery oczy” that dot this evocative and phantasmal movie. I also loved how Pawlikowski made his couple fall out of love during their cohabitation in Paris and — spoiler alert — brought them together under exacting circumstances. Imagine Mani Ratnam's Alaipayuthey getting an art housecinema touch with the 1950s’ tropes thrown in.

Speaking of Tamil cinema, C Prem Kumar's debut movie, 96, starring Vijay Sethupathi and Trisha Krishnan, is definitely on my Top 10 list of best Indian movies of 2018. The cinematographer-turned-director made a movie about the laconic and inarticulate photographer, Ram (Sethupathi), a 1990s’ child from Thanjavur who never found courage and lost his chance at a life with his childhood love, Jaanu (Trisha).

A school reunion brings them both face to face for less than 12 hours, and the movie is about them rediscovering the lost love, recalling the fond childhood memories and chiding each other with recriminations. It's a well-established fact that Sethupathi is the Sanjeev Kumar of post-2000 Indian cinema, but even by those dizzying standards, he outdid himself as a coy man-child who's still in thrall of his short-term beloved's singing and whose sheer presence is enough to leave him cooing over her. The way he kowtows to her and accedes to each of her demands is splendid.

The first half is more about the lead couple's younger selves and how they fall in love with each other, which, frankly speaking, needed some brutal chopping at the editing table. It's 2018 and Tamil filmmakers still seem to have a pathological aversion to making a movie under 150 minutes. Prem Kumar could have easily made this a 130-minute magnum opus instead of leaving it punishingly long. But he makes up for his sins by making the second half all about the grown-ups.

Music director Govind Vasantha ably supports Prem Kumar's goosebumps-inducing moments. “The Life of Ram” and “Kaathalae Kaathalae" have lately been the soundtrack for most of my evenings. There's a beautiful scene where Ram's photography students mistake Jaanu as his wife and ask her all about their romance, and she plays along and weaves a story that will instantly make one's eyes well up.

Props to the director for keeping the proceedings threateningly bland and never letting the cinematographer in him intervene and make the scenes look showy. There are a handful of wonderful movies about couples having enriching conversations over a day's period, such as Before Sunset, Before Sunrise and, Certified Copy. 96 deserves a place there.

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